If you share your PC with many users, some of whom may be messy users with a habit of littering files and changing settings, or you might just be a privacy nut who doesn’t like to leave any traces behind, either way, a new and previously unannounced feature in Windows 7 called “PC Safeguard” might just be what you’re after.

First noticed by the enthusiasts at JCXP.net, “PC Safeguard”, as it is called in the Windows 7 user account settings, prevents specified standard user accounts (cannot be applied to admin accounts) from making permanent and unwanted changes by removing all changes and files saved after the user logs off.

Credit where credit is due, this feature is not fundamentally new. Since 2005, Microsoft has offered a tool previously known as the “Shared Computer Toolkit” now “Windows SteadyState” to both Windows XP and Vista users to do exactly this function and a little more. The interesting thing however is that the feature is now baked into Windows 7 – making it more widely known to users as well as simplifying the process drastically.

To enable this feature, click on the “Set up PC Safeguard” link when managing a user account. Select the “Turn on PC Safeguard” option, apply and wait approximately 5 minutes whilst it ponders about the question of life. It might seem like it’s not responding, but trust me, the magic is happening.

If you’re big brother with a soft spot, you can also tweak the Safeguard feature to allow users to access individual hard drive volumes. One scenario where this might be useful is to set up a small 1GB partition where the user can secure their files without resorting to removable media.

Now when that user logs on, they are presented with this message window reminding them their files will be removed after log off. Also when they try to add files to their user folders, a popup appears, reminding the impending vaporization.

From this point on, the user experience is identical to any other standard user’s. They can access applications installed for all-users, change wallpapers and themes and download files. There’s no performance impact, nor additional restrictions. The difference however is that everything will be reverted to a blank state the next time they log in. Metaphorically speaking, it’s like IE8’s InPrivate or Google Chrome’s Incognito for user profiles.

I suspect this feature will be fined tuned in the coming Windows 7 builds to inherit some of the more advanced features of SteadyState (ex. time restriction and application blacklist) but I can already see this very popular with home and public computers.

Update: To the contrary, this feature has actually been removed from Windows 7 since the beta builds.

Nice, but I still would’ve preferred some sort of sandboxing tool that I can just install an application to without it affecting anything else, without having to log into a different account. Would be ideal for when you have to download some poorly written third party app just to convert a file or something.

Great for Internet Cafes or when my friends ‘borrow’ my computer. Im loving WIndows 7 more and more by the day. I think Vista was a required pain to get to this. I take my hat off for Sinofsky and all the microsofties. If Apple dare carry on thier stupid childish adverts Ill throw my iPhone in the bin!

I’m glad they’re finally offering SteadyState as part of the core OS. A feature I’ve been using for quite some time for public-access computers, I’ve always felt that this is something that should at least ship with the enterprise versions of the operating system.

Is there any hint as to whether this will be available for domain-joined systems, and available to be setup via Group Policy? I’d love to be able to stop paying for DeepFreeze license renewals and use this instead, however being able to have a degree of remote management and be able to turn it on or off based on a User/Group or GPO would be absolutely required.

Long – can you get a copy of the cool Windows7 wallpaper that doesnt seem to come with Windows7 that we got at PDC? The login screen wallpaper? The blue, underwater looking light from above wallpaper? Gracias and ciao!

it’s the Windows Disk Protection feature of SCT/SteadyState? Awesome!! Best of all, it’ll work with 64-bit since it’ll be part of the OS. I guess this offers “registry safeguard” as well because the registry eventually is a set of files in %windir%\system32\config and %userprofile%.

You know, this reminds me of something our IT does for our lab computers. They use a program called Deep Freeze which essentially does the same thing, and works both for the MAC and PC. I’m going to tell them about it, see if when we upgrade to 7 if we should use this technology instead of Deep Freeze.

I’ve had a pretty bad experience with something like this. We were setting up the college comps for LAN Gaming and the lab in-charge did not tell us that the machine was sand-boxed, they had a software called Deep Freeze installed on all the comps, we installed the games unawares and shut down the comps only to come next day and find everything gone. We performed the sequence 3 times only to hit our heads with the wall on realizing that the machine must’ve been sand-boxed.

@Long Zheng:
Yes, i’m sure it’s a standard user. I also tried it with/without a password and things like that.
I suppose this features depends on the processor used then, the same as with DEP, that won’t run on older processors either.

I agree with Frank. When I first saw the title to this entry I thought it was a built in application sandbox. I hope hope they integrate that as well… oh wait, I’ll just submit it to the Windows 7 Taskforce site. =]

I never had this option before. I had it installed along side another operating system.
I decided to reinstall windows, letting it take the entire drive. During the installation, windows created a hidden
system partition at 200mb, and afterards, after creating the standard account, the pc safeguard option was available. Perhaps it could have to do with letting Windows 7 take the entire drive, or to have a Windows System partition.

I’ve been looking for something like this and had no idea that Microsoft had this. I’ve ran into something called SteadierState, but it is only for Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate. Thanks for the write up.